She feinted toward one of the cruisers, teasing it, daring it to fire on her, accelerating at the last instant to try to slip by. It and a second craft laced together a threatening forcefield net. Their actions told Koronin for certain that the fleet had no intention of destroying her. They would hunt her down and capture her; she had only one other choice.
Copernicus touched down, Dionysus close behind. Jim and Uhura left the shuttlecraft. Sulu took off again to continue the air search.
Lindy led Athene out of Dionysus.
“Lindy—don’t, dammit, I asked you to go back to the Enterprise—”
“I’m going to look for Mr. Spock. I’ll take Athene up as soon as I can. The gravity storm spooked her.” Her voice was taut with worry, both for Spock and for the equiraptor. Blood flowed from a gash across Athene’s near foreleg. Lindy knelt to bandage it.
Dionysus lifted off again before Jim could tell Stephen what he thought of him. Angry, Jim strode past Lindy and Athene and stared at the endless landscape of sheer drops and abrupt outcroppings—
The granite surface of the pinnacle’s sheer face felt rough and cold against his bruised cheek. Above him, Starfleet clung to the pinnacle’s tip. Sighing with the wind, the primate reached out, as if its minuscule strength could help him climb the last few lengths of stone.
He looked down. The height revived him. The cold wind dried his sweat and soothed the scrapes and bruises on his hands and arms and face. He tried to make sense of the changes he felt. This was the way people had dealt with grief and pain since they were people, by coming to the wilderness and healing themselves in solitude and freedom. Other vague memories troubled him, intimations of different ways, but he could neither recall them completely nor escape them.
[310] He stood up, balancing precariously on the soaring spear of stone.
—and at Commander Spock’s tall, gaunt figure, high on a granite spire, spreading his arms to the wind as if he had wings.
Jim had no time to consider, no time to explain, no time even to think.
“Lindy! Look out!” He ran toward Athene. He stepped just wrong on his right leg, hearing the twist and snap of the joint but barely feeling it, anyway it did not matter, one more step and he lunged over Athene’s hindquarters and onto her back and propelled her forward with his heels and his voice. Lindy jumped away with a shout of surprise. Athene plunged into a rough gallop. She, too, favored one knee. Jim clutched her mane. Her wings spread and rose and beat. She lurched into the air. Her feathers brushed against him from ankle to shoulder. He wished he had flown on Athene, not just ridden her. He wished Athene liked him better. He wished she had a bridle.
He leaned into a turn. Athene responded, flying toward Spock. The Vulcan looked exhausted and confused and at the limits of his strength. He wavered.
Athene swooped past him. As Spock’s legs buckled, Jim grabbed him by one arm. Spock fell against Athene’s side. The extra weight and the abrupt, awkward change made her falter. Her wings hesitated, then pounded harder as she struggled to remain in the air.
Jim barely kept his seat. Though Spock weighed little, the low gravity did not diminish his mass, his inertia. Jim had no leverage. Leaning sideways with his arm extended against Athene’s flank, he dragged Spock along. He clamped his legs to Athene’s sides. Pain stabbed through his knee.
“Commander Spock! Dammit, give me some help!”
Athene’s wing joints squeezed against his knees with every downbeat. The stiff primaries scraped against his face and neck with each upswing. His sweating hand slid on Spock’s wrist. Athene labored to turn, struggling across a canyon so deep that its river flowed among wall-spheres, the bedrock of the worldship.
Jim heard the beating of a second pair of wings. But if [311] Scarlet could have helped another flyer carry a disabled person, she could not help Athene.
Slowly, painfully, the Vulcan’s fingers clasped Jim’s wrist. He reached up with his other hand and grabbed Jim’s arm.
Jim pulled him upward. The Vulcan clambered onto Athene’s back.
Starfleet scrambled up from where it had been desperately clutching Spock’s ankle.
Athene touched down, stumbled, recovered, stretched her wings wide, and came to a trembling halt. As she limped toward Lindy, Jim sagged over her withers. He could hardly believe he was on the ground again. It seemed as if he had been aloft for an hour, but it could not have been more than a couple of minutes.
Lindy ran to him and eased Spock down. Jim dismounted, landing on his good leg, leaning against Athene’s side to try to catch his breath.
“Jim, are you all right? Mr. Spock—?”
“I think so. Lindy, I’m sorry, I couldn’t see any other way—I hope I didn’t hurt her ...”
Blood soaked the rough bandage on Athene’s knee. The sight of it made Jim’s knee feel as if someone were tickling the inside of the joint with one of Athene’s wing feathers. He wished it would just hurt. He gritted his teeth and tightened all the muscles of his right leg.
His knee responded by folding away under him and pitching him unceremoniously to the ground.
Jim stood gingerly, his knee supported by a temporary splint from Copernicus’* first aid kit. Nearby, Athene nibbled Scarlet’s shoulder as the flyer soothed her and Lindy rebandaged the cut across the equiraptor’s foreleg. Starfleet climbed up Sulu and clung to his shoulder and his hair, screeching down at Ilya, who arched his back and fluffed his fur and spat and snarled while Sulu tried to untangle himself from the primate. Inside Copernicus, Uhura tried to contact the Enterprise through the jamming field, and whispered to herself in Scarlet’s language.
Spock lay unconscious on the ground. Stephen, kneeling next to him, looked around and managed to smile. “We’re quite a crew, aren’t we?”
[312] “Let’s get out of here,” Jim said. “Dionysus is faster than Copernicus ... you take Lindy and Athene and Spock back to the Enterprise. I’ll be right behind you.”
Stephen calculated instantly that the proposal would not work. “We don’t have time,” he said. “Even if the Enterprise is still out there, Spock doesn’t have time.”
“I’m not going to risk the life of everybody here—!”
Stephen launched himself at Jim, to grab him by the shirt and shake him in fury. But in the low gravity, the motion flung them both tumbling into the air. They came down in a tangle, bouncing. Athene shied sideways, snorting.
“What’s the matter with you guys?” Lindy shouted.
“If I’m willing to risk my life you can at least cooperate!” Stephen shouted at Jim. He picked himself up. He felt angry, truly angry, but the feeling snapped itself out of reach, and vanished.
Jim rose. “What do you mean, risk your life?”
“If I mind-meld with Spock when he’s in this state, I might be able to bring him out of it—or we might both end up in a coma.”
“I can’t permit—”
“You don’t have anything to say about it!” Stephen picked Spock up and carried him into Copernicus.
Fuming, Jim watched him go. They could not just sit here in the open as the worldship drifted farther and farther from Federation space. They could not just sit and wait for the Klingon battle cruiser to take care of Koronin and come back after them. If the Empire could wring propaganda value from one Starfleet officer, imagine what it could do with four, one of them a captain of recent notoriety.
“Mr. Sulu—”
“What?” Sulu said, distracted by the fact that Starfleet had clamped its hands and feet in his hair and ear and the collar of his shirt. “I mean, yes, sir?”
“Can you fly Dionysus?”
Starfleet plastered one hand across Sulu’s mouth, muffling whatever the lieutenant might have said, which Jim suspected had nothing to do with Stephen’s ship. Sulu persuaded Starfleet to stay wrapped around his upper arm.
Jim was glad Starfleet had adopted the lieutenant. The primate gave him the creeps.
[313] “I can fly an admiral’s yacht, capta
in,” Sulu said.
“Good.”
In the aft cabin of Copernicus, Stephen laid Spock on a bunk formed from unfolded seats.
Spock’s face, in unconsciousness, relaxed into a truer, more vulnerable image. Stephen smoothed Spock’s hair into its usual patent-leather impeccability.
The composed Starfleet officer had vanished. Spock’s bruised cheek and developing black eye and his neatened hair gave him the appearance of a small boy who had disobeyed his parents’ orders to stay clean because company was coming, who had instead played with the other children and got hit with a baseball, but was bluffing it out. Stephen tried to smile at the image, but the necessity of focusing his attention drew him inexorably into an emotionless Vulcan state of mind.
“Stephen?”
Stephen looked up blankly.
“Can you help him?” Jim Kirk asked.
“I will try,” he said, his voice cold.
The captain frowned. “Are you all right?”
“It has been a very long time since I attempted deep trance.” Stephen changed. He abandoned his desperate determination to feel as well as think; he grew impassive, cool, and disinterested. He felt no apprehension about the risk.
Mind-melding with an injured intelligence is dangerous. Only a dangerous process can save Spock’s life. Only a Vulcan can conduct the process. I am—still—a Vulcan. Therefore, I must make the attempt. Q.E.D.
The logical, rational progression could result in two deaths.
“Stephen—” Jim said.
Stephen turned away. He knew, intellectually, that a word of reassurance would ease the captain’s worries. But a word of reassurance would be a lie. A direct lie was inconceivable, reassurance meaningless.
For Stephen, James Kirk ceased to exist.
Spock grew weaker. He depleted his mental and physical resources in an attempt to reconcile Scarlet’s memories and knowledge with his own lifetime of study. Stephen could [314] sense the tendrils of confusion interweaving and contorting, dragging Spock into darkness like a weighted net.
Stephen placed his fingertips at Spock’s temples, accepted pain, grief, and confusion, and took a slow breath.
He let his intellect sink through the layers of Spock’s mind. Stephen believed the mind-melding ability descended to his people from the time before they had put aside any reliance on emotion, from the time when close emotional connections helped ensure survival in a difficult land. His experience with mind-melding had helped him understand, and regret, what Vulcans had given up.
Stephen encountered the memories that Spock had perceived, Scarlet’s memories. Their power astonished him. No wonder Spock had been left stunned and confused. Stephen wondered if he himself would have survived the direct connection.
The flying people existed for intensity of experience. They had designed and constructed the worldship on the basis of a technology far beyond the Federation’s electronic and mechanical abilities. To a superficial inspection, their work looked mysteriously like no technology at all.
They understood it so well that they thought about it as often as they thought about breathing. They did not need to think about it. And so they had freed themselves to concentrate on a life of the mind. Stephen hesitated, awed by even a shadowy third-hand reflection of Scarlet’s reality. Philosophy and imagination, reminiscences and fantasies, generations of stories from her ancestors, from the worldship’s poets, physics and mathematics so esoteric that they became indistinguishable from philosophy and poetry: all expressed in the language of the flyers, a language of which not a single word could be translated (it did not use words), but which Stephen felt he understood all the way to the atoms of his substance.
Stephen experienced the exhilaration of Scarlet’s flights through thunderstorms, the pain of a lightning strike across one wing, the terror of a thousand-meter freefall before she struggled back into exhilarated flight.
And finally, deepest and most powerful, Stephen felt the love and grief that had overpowered Spock and drawn him [315] inexorably to the wild center of the worldship, where flyers came to be silent and to heal themselves, or to die.
Spock had come very close to dying.
When two flying people chose to love each other, their love crossed the whole spectrum of the word’s meanings. Scarlet and her mate loved each other in that way, and fiercely. When he died, her love transmuted to grief.
Scarlet overcame the pain and the loneliness during her long sojourn in silence. But she had not forgotten it. It would never occur to her to try to forget it.
Poor Spock, Stephen thought. Vulcans claim they control all their emotions in order to eliminate anger and violence, as if anger were the hardest thing to conquer. But it’s ridiculously simple compared to grief, compared to love. And Spock ran head-on into both.
Stephen let himself drift deeper.
Something had gone wrong with Stephen’s training. He had learned his lessons well: he had completely conquered his own emotional responses. And yet, once he hid his emotions away where he could no longer find them, his wish to experience them remained. But Spock, who wished to achieve the perfect ideal of control, who almost always succeeded in outwardly maintaining it, was not nearly so unfeeling as the image he presented to the world.
Stephen envied him bitterly.
Stephen felt a silent presence observing him.
Spock? he said in his mind.
I did not recognize you in your Vulcan avatar, Spock said to Stephen, more clearly than if they were speaking face to face.
Stephen felt a quick flicker of his own true joy. Like a shivering child he grasped it and tried to fan it into a flame.
The spark faded, and Stephen knew that he lacked the ability to make it return.
Do you know where you are, Spock? he said. Do you remember what happened?
Yes, Spock replied.
Come with me. Come back. Your body weakens.
I cannot, Spock said.
You have no choice!
[316] I have a choice. I choose to send you back to the world alone.
But why?
Spock hesitated.
What I experienced ... he replied. But the thought faded, incomplete.
Stephen realized how much Scarlet’s exhilarating emotions had distressed Spock. They had driven him to this featureless place, and now they blocked his return.
If he had been talking to Spock face to face, he would have put on an act of extreme emotion, shouted at him, taunted him ... But here, everything he said had to be true. The connection between them permitted no deception.
You survived once, Stephen said. Surely you can survive again.
You do not understand, Spock said. You ... cannot.
No, Stephen admitted. I cannot. I wish I could.
You are a fool, Spock said, with exhausted anger. You have always been a fool. You were the best of us, the most promising of a generation. When we were children I admired you above all others, though I knew the emotion to be unseemly, unworthy of a Vulcan. At times I even envied you. Self-discipline and self-control came so easily to you. But you threw them away.
I fled them, Stephen said. They pursue me, and I cannot escape them. Spock, when we were children I did not envy you—
Of course not. You felt nothing.
—but I do now. I have progressed that far.
Stephen, Spock said, if you succeed in this quest, it will only give you pain.
Even pain would be preferable to nothingness. Spock—we could have helped each other when we were children. We never did. Now we must. Come with me. We can go back together.
The silence stretched on so long that Stephen thought Spock had slipped away forever.
Spock—?
Very well, Spock said quietly.
The labyrinthine pattern of Scarlet’s experiences closed in around Stephen as he sought to return. Fascinated, [317] mesmerized, he moved deeper into it. He knew that if he lost himself in the maze, if he let the maze permeate his spirit, its po
wer would permit him to reach his own center, which had been locked away so long.
Then he felt Spock drifting from him. He realized how close to his limits Spock had pressed himself.
Unwillingly, Stephen retreated from the perceptions he found so tempting. He abandoned the complex path and returned to one of simplicity.
Come with me, Spock, he said.
The shadowy presence responded, reaching out for him, gratefully accepting the strength Stephen offered.
The memories and perceptions weakened, faded, vanished. Spock shut them away, freeing himself from them, taking them forever beyond Stephen’s grasp.
Regaining consciousness, Spock raised himself from the bunk in the aft cabin of Copernicus. He watched dispassionately as Stephen sagged onto one of the passenger benches, hunched around himself as if he were cold, and fell into an exhausted sleep. His long gold hair, damp with sweat, curled against his forehead and his neck.
Spock, too, felt drained. He remembered everything that had happened since he communicated with Scarlet in the grassy shuttlecraft bay.
He remembered everything.
He remembered the blast of hot wind as Quundar accelerated toward the worldship’s sky; he remembered the pulsing gravity waves of the Klingon dreadnought ploughing away in pursuit.
And he remembered what would happen if the dreadnought opened fire and a stray volley hit the worldship.
He hurried forward.
“Captain Kirk—”
“Spock—! What happened? Is Stephen—”
“Are you in communication with the Enterprise?”
“No, it’s out of range, or jammed—I don’t even want to consider the possibility that Mr. Scott took the ship into battle—”
“We may already be too late. If Koronin has provoked an attack from the dreadnought, if Mr. Scott has engaged the Empire forces ... Captain, a dreadnought torpedo, an [318] Enterprise phaser volley—either would deliver enough energy to cross the worldship’s reaction threshold.”
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